This is your first attempt at directing Shakespeare’s English history plays. Why is that?

I’ve always been intimidated by them. I’ve just felt unprepared, maybe, to tackle them. But it’s been a nonstop joy working on Richard II. My earlier fears now feel silly, as fears often do in retrospect.

You’ve said before that any theatre production involves a kind of “blended time,” reflecting the time period of the original story, the period in which it was written, the period in which the audience watches it, as well as any other era or setting a director might choose to overlay. Have you found that trickier with a history play?

Honestly, I think part of my resistance or fear was that very issue. But the language is so rich and the humanity of the characters and their conflicts is just so apparent that sliding into a more contemporary setting has created more opportunities than challenges. There are things [we grappled with], for instance, the jousting: We talked about contemporary equivalents to jousting, but there is a modern movement where people do jousting—in armor, on horseback, with lances. So there’s no reason to change that.

I do think, too, that when dealing with lineal heritage, the honor of the family and the tradition of kingship—whether it’s Shakespeare writing in the late 1500s about something a couple hundred years before, or whether it’s us 400 years later looking at it—there are things from the past that carry into the present and on to the future. So it’s not as if because something is in a modern setting that it erases the past.

I think it’s a very simple and straightforward production in many ways. One of the things that’s always interested me is the public/private dynamic in the piece, so trying to acknowledge the audience in the Thomas Theatre has been a driving factor in the production.

Much as with King Lear, which was so powerful in the Thomas in 2013, one of the main threads of Richard’s story is not just loss but diminishment, a shrinking from grandiosity into reflective melancholy. Do the close quarters help to draw out this element?

Absolutely. I do think one of the things that Lear and Richard II have in common is that as the king loses his power, his title and his privilege, he gains his humanity. It’s so beautifully charted in the piece, and I feel proud to be doing it in such an intimate space.

My trip to the Globe theatre in London a few years back was such a revelation, seeing how much of the text was played directly to the audience. It just reinforced my belief that these plays were written to have the actor in the center of the playing space, surrounded by audience. Any Shakespeare play is as much a dialogue between the actors and the audience as it is between the characters. And the Thomas lends itself to that even more naturally than the Allen Elizabethan or the Bowmer.

The historian Simon Schama has described Richard II as “someone trapped in an adolescent fantasy of indestructibility.” Who have you come to believe that Richard is? Where’s the line between his virtues and vices?

That’s kind of the unanswerable question. But Shakespeare deals again and again with how power and privilege can shield people from their most human impulses. So I want to excavate the humanity in the writing as much as possible and really highlight that journey.

Jeff King is playing Henry Bullingbrook, and in the rehearsal room I’m so energized by the scenes between Jeff and Christopher. I felt like I understood the scenes, but when they bite into them, they’re teaching me about all that goes unspoken underneath the language—in terms of the history, the fact that these men are cousins, that they’ve grown up together, and the layers of resentment and love and respect and frustration and contempt. It’s what makes me so excited about the history plays, that they’re the story of a nation and the story of a family. As Bill Cain talks about in Equivocation [2009], politics is family drama writ large. And man, does Shakespeare understand that and go right after it.

So if the play is part family drama, part political chess match and part meditation on the nature of power, you’re emphasizing the first of those?

They’re all there, but there’s no doubt that doing the play with only 14 people and in an intimate space foregrounds the family drama. We hope it will be visually rich, but it’s not an investment in the spectacle, it’s investigating the psychology and the interpersonal dynamics.

When you chose this season, you couldn’t have known that we would have, in effect, lines of succession being disputed in both our major parties. Do you see this play shedding light on our present politics?

There’s no doubt. We have all the questions of legacy on the Clinton side. And I knew that in a presidential election year, the question of what makes an effective leader would be active. But it certainly does take on a whole different weight this year, given who the candidates are.

Are you hoping to set a template of any sort for the history plays to follow, or are you careful not to constrain future directors?

I do think that whoever directs Henry V [in 2018] will probably inherit the actor who gets cast as Prince Hal. There are only three characters that go from Richard II to Henry IV, Part One—Bullingbrook, Northumberland and Henry Percy, but there are many more that go from Henry IV to Henry V. So how far we take that [casting] will be significant.

Whoever directs each of these, I just want the productions to be really vibrant and vital and relevant. And that doesn’t at all mean that they have to be modern dress, but just that there’s a muscularity in the way the plays are attacked. Irreverence against stale tradition in order to get to a deep truth—that’s what I care about with Shakespeare. And I think that’s especially important with the history plays.